Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is widely considered to be a central figure of modern philosophy. He argued that fundamental concepts structure human experience, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to have a major influence in contemporary thought, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to explain the relationship between reason and human experience. With this project, he hoped to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He attempted to put an end to what he considered an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Tossup Questions # This man claimed that since he could not experience transcendent concepts like God, he had to "deny knowledge to make room for faith." This thinker argued that humans only experience the appearances of things in his definition of transcendental idealism. This philosopher posited the unknowable noumena to contrast with observable phenomena. Subjects that either contain or do not contain their predicates form the basis of his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. This man used theft and lying as examples of actions that are prohibited by the categorical imperative. For 10 points, name this German philosopher who wrote Critique of Pure Reason. # John McDowell endorsed this thinker's view that raw experiences are endowed with rational content, allowing a spontaneous mind to still be receptive to empirical facts. A commentary on one of his works rejects most of it, but agrees that any self-conscious being aware of experiences must also be aware of objective realities, rebutting skepticism. In The Bounds of Sense, P.F. Strawson contends that (*) "transcendental deduction" is this man's most important contribution. Arthur Schopenhauer included an appendix of this thinker's errors in The World as Will and Representation, but also compared reading this man's writings to "a cataract operation on a blind person." This man hoped his own work would serve as a "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, resolving the errors of rationalism and empiricism through his transcendental idealism. For 10 points, name this author of Critique of Pure Reason. # This man held that the mind uses two "forms of pure intuition" and twelve "categories of the understanding" to help synthesize experience, a view he called transcendental idealism. This man wrote an essay flat-out rejecting any "right to lie," even to a prospective murderer at one's doorstep. This thinker said that people should act only by precepts which can rationally apply as universal law in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which discusses the categorical imperative. For 10 points, name this German Enlightenment author of Critique of Pure Reason. # This man wrote a work which compared historical religions to "clothing" and rational religions to "bare humans." Another one of his works proposed constitutional republics as a proper political means of attaining perpetual peace. This philosopher drafted three propositions regarding duty and authored a work which focuses on (*) a priori knowledge. He suggested following an unconditional, universal law that would function in all circumstances. For ten points, name this philosopher who wrote Critique of Pure Reason and introduced the categorical imperative in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. # This philosopher argued that the only way to exercise freedom is to act morally, because otherwise one's actions are bound by one's conditional desires. This thinker defined the title concept of one of his essays as "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity." He postulated that our senses perceive only phenomena and not noumena, so we can never truly know the "thing-in-itself." This author of "What is Enlightenment?" argued that we should act only according to maxims that could be made universal law, which he called the "categorical imperative." For 10 points, name this German author of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Pure Reason.